At Westbourne Grove Church, we are currently doing a series of teachings aimed at renewing the intellectual foundations for our engagement both with the Bible and with a world going through tumultuous upheaval. An extravagant and presumptuous ambition, I know, but you’ve got to try.
For me, it is an opportunity to implement much of the narrative-historical hermeneutic that I have argued for and used on this site and in other writings. I’m not putting myself forward as a model speaker—far from it. But I’ve enjoyed doing these talks, the response has been pretty good, and perhaps they will give others hope that the church can be shifted on to more solid biblical ground as it braces for the shockwave of the age to come.
The text below the video is not a transcript but an overview of the topic.
We screened the People’s Emergency Briefing film in the week before this message, so the climate crisis loomed menacingly. In the film, Jennifer Saunders of Absolutely Fabulous fame asks a good question: “What’s the matter with us?” What is the matter with us as a civilisation?
There is no eco-crisis in the New Testament, but we often read Romans 8:19-21 as an expression of Paul’s conviction that the whole of creation will eventually be set free from the consequences of the fall of humanity.
I think that misses the point.
Paul earlier offered an analysis of the culture of the Greeks: they knew God but they turned to futility and worshipped the created object rather than the creator (Rom. 1:20-25). That analysis is recalled when he talks about the sufferings of the apostles in “this present time” (8:18).
The materials of God’s good creation—wood, stone, metals—have been subjected by the Greeks to the futility of idol worship. Therefore, the created object looks forward to the day when the redeemed people of God will be vindicated for their faith in a transformed future, because it will then be liberated from its slavery to the ethically and socially corrupting power of pagan religious practice.
In the meantime, the whole of personified creation groans—as it always does—on account of the wickedness and folly of the societies that live upon it. Paul is aware of the symbolic entanglement of creation as a whole in the crisis of the end of the age of Greek religious dominance. But his focus is on the particular exploitation and abuse of the physical materials.
We are likewise living through a civilisational crisis. We may affirm the groaning of creation, the mourning of the earth, but at the heart of the analysis should be the subjection of the stuff of God’s creation to the pointlessness and corrupting influence of over-consumption, wastefulness, greed.
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